After the awesomeness that was their compilation album A Decade Of Drekkadance, TrollfesT are back with their latest full-length album Kaptein Kaos, which is another great concept album and this time the band are telling the tale of Kaptein Kaos, an inventor who creates a time machine and goes on an expedition across time!
One of the things I was most intrigued about was how TrollfesT would get the album to have a ‘time travelling’ vibe to it, after their previous albums sounding like the main concept (for example, Villanden sounds duckish, Brumlebassen sounds like a bee is buzzing around in your head and En Kvest For Den Hellige Gral feels like you’re on the quest with the trolls!) and the way TrollfesT have achieved this is very clever – by interweaving album-specific vibes into some of the tracks of the album.
There’s Trolltramp, which is like the next stage up from Willkommen Folk Tell Drekka Fest!‘s Trollkamp and is a cleaner, more atmospheric track to its counterpart and does a perfect job at building up the album, with your heart racing with excitement by the time it finishes as you’re waiting for the first track to kick in. Then there’s Vulkan which has some definite Brumlebassen vibes to it courtesy of the drumming and Renkespill almost feels like a throwback to Villanden‘s Der Jegermeister, which is great! It’s incredibly clever of the band and it almost feels like you’re travelling through the best bits of their back-catalogue, which is an experience in itself.
That’s not to say Kaptein Kaos isn’t just about the old stuff, because TrollfesT are blazing a new trail with the addition of prominent clean vocals in some of the songs and one of the highlights of the album has got to be Sagn Om Stein, which is unlike anything we’ve heard from them before. It’s a track performed by the full band but there isn’t one line of Trollmannen’s screeching vocals we all know and love – instead featuring solely clean singing and spoken words. It’s more of a melodic one with a big chorus, and a far cry from their ‘usual’ sound, yet it’s still undeniably TrollfesT and is definitely a track you’ll keep wanting to revisiting.
As with most albums, there are always going to be a few weaker tracks, and although nothing stands out as being bad, Solskinnsmedisin just feels a bit out of place in the bigger scale of things. Although it’s quite clear that this is a song all about Kaptein Kaos’ trip to a an exotic location and the subsequent cabana party, the main body of the track just isn’t memorable enough to make an impression, which is a shame because this could have been great.
However, Kaptein Kaos does feature the best TrollfesT song to date, the phenomenal Die Grosse Echsen, which is such a bouncy and fun-sounding track you’ll half-want to dance around to it as soon as the opening begins. It has one of the catchiest and infectious saxophone lines that’s ever featured on a TrollfesT track, which gets repeated as a guitar solo and super-cheesy-sounding keyboard solo at certain sections in the track, and is one of those lines you’ll find yourself absent-mindedly humming long after you’ve finished listening to the album.
As a whole, Kaptein Kaos is a superb offering from the band and it honestly does feel like TrollfesT aren’t capable of making a bad album because once again, they’ve completely delivered. A highly recommended listen.
8/10
